The Quiet Before, page 3
A quarter century had passed, and Peiresc still dreamed of calculating longitude by having many people stare up at the sky at once on the same night. But over time he had switched to Earth’s moon as a more visible reference point—and the notion of observing the phases of an eclipse through a telescope. Now, at fifty-five, he was finally in a position to make such a collective experiment happen.
Born to a family of magistrates and minor landowners in southeast France, Peiresc had spent his life collecting correspondents. First as a law student and in his travels to England, the Netherlands, and Italy (where he met Galileo after a mathematics lecture in Padua), and then even after he returned to Aix-en-Provence to take up a position in the parliament of Provence, he never stopped expanding his web of connections. He had linked up and become, over time, a leading citizen of the self-proclaimed Republic of Letters, the network of dozens and dozens of university scholars, learned aristocrats, and clergy spread throughout Europe. Together, they were exploring the era’s newfound mysteries—astronomical, microscopic, and geographic.
The Republic was a collaborative venture that resembled the editorial board of a scientific journal (before such publications, and the notion of science as we know it, really existed) and was maintained through a patchwork of letters. The correspondents wrote to one another about their various tinkerings, floated theories, and sealed relationships by sharing fossils or anatomical drawings. Certain qualities of what would come to characterize the scientific community first took shape through these missives. It was “a laboratory in which ideas about civility were elaborated and lived,” wrote Peter Miller, one of the few academics who has studied Peiresc’s letters. And each individual letter, as another historian described it, was “a substitute for gentlemanly conversation,” which enabled the writer “to produce intimacy and immediacy at a distance, without alienating the correspondent with argument.” The letter writers embarked together on a project of seeking objective truth, and they acted as clearinghouses for one another, checking theories and exchanging information. The letter as a conveyor of voice, calibrated to express politeness and friendship, proved a particularly useful form for this joint research. And Peiresc always got the tone right. He was charming and generous, and he evinced a genuine curiosity about the discoveries of others.
A Republic of Letters had existed in some form since the Renaissance, a revival of a classical concept that originated with Cicero. But it really took off during the Reformation and the resulting religious wars that convulsed Europe from 1500 to 1700. Travel during these conflicts became dangerous for scholars. And with most universities co-opted by one warring sect or another, the Republic became a secular institution of learning, above the fray. Peiresc and others treated it almost like a cult, excited by the sense that they were producing knowledge in a kind of relay and passing it from one generation to the next. As René Descartes, the French philosopher and contemporary of Peiresc’s, wrote, “With the later persons beginning where the earlier ones left off, and thereby linking the lives and the work of many people, we can all go forward together much further than each person individually would be able to do.”
A glimpse into Peiresc’s study in Aix would show just how much energy existed in the Republic and how eclectic its interests. The letters arrived at his town house in a constant flow, often multiple times a day, with the envelopes sometimes emanating the sickly sweet smell of vinegar, a disinfectant against the plague. Collect, observe, and compare. This was the ethic that guided the practice of the Republic’s members, many of whom, like Peiresc, were antiquaries, possessors of cabinets of curiosities. There was the massive library of printed books, leather bound, on his shelves, loose-leaf manuscripts everywhere, next to ancient vessels and engraved gems. There were embryos preserved in jars and detailed drawings of both the real and the bizarre riches of nature—from bulbous mushrooms to hippopotamus skin. Sometimes a large object dominated his study, a mummy or an elephant’s tusk. Drawers were filled with medals and coins going back through the centuries; there were seventeen thousand pieces in that collection upon his death. A quality of gift giving characterized the enterprise. At his feet and lazying about amid all this ephemera were the fluffy white-furred and blue-eyed Angora kittens that he loved to breed but was willing to part with if it meant he might add a precious piece to his cabinet (“If it were useful to promise one of the kittens in order to get the vase of Vivot, do not hesitate to commit yourself”). His interests extended outside, as well. He had vast orchards where he grew more than twenty species of citron and sixty varieties of apple. He grafted olive trees and made wine from the malvoisie grapes that were plentiful on his family’s country estate.
Living at this moment, before scholarship developed into a specialized pursuit reserved for professionals, an amateur polymath like Peiresc went anywhere his curiosity took him—botany, zoology, numerology, and, of course, astronomy. The mechanics of everything—how a heart beat, how a flower reproduced, how a comet streaked across the sky—had to be examined. Even the fantastical: Peiresc took seriously reports of a man with a bush growing out of his stomach, a town in which every citizen claimed to be possessed by the devil, and a Frenchwoman supposedly pregnant for twenty-three months. Nor did he scoff at sightings of monstrous hydra-headed animals or giants. Why should he when news of strange and beautiful creatures like the long-necked horse known as a giraffe and the elegant, slender-limbed pink flamingo had turned out to be true? Peiresc wrote that because he had seen such marvels that he would have never previously believed, he tried “to neglect nothing until experience opens the way for us to pure truth.”
This single-minded devotion to questioning the nature of everything was such that Peiresc chose consciously to have an ascetic life. When his father found him a good match for marriage, the daughter of the president of the Chambre des Comptes of Provence, Peiresc explained that he “could not care for a wife and children and be free to follow my studies and patronize learned men.” He remained a bachelor his whole life.
But he was not alone in his intellectual pursuits. He wrote letters all day long (mostly in French and Italian and sometimes in Latin), and he could rely on an increasingly predictable and secure system to get them to their destinations. A letter from Aix to Paris took about a week, to Rome about two weeks, and to North Africa six weeks. And the routes were becoming more dependable, regular enough that he referred to letters to Paris as sent “par le Parisien”; the Avignon–Rome courier was simply “l’ordinaire.”
These letters functioned as more than simply one-to-one communications. They were like messages carried along a stream with many tributaries—often copied and passed to readers beyond the originally intended addressee or read aloud at scholarly gatherings. This annotated excerpt from one of Peiresc’s letters in 1635 shows just how far they could travel: “I opened a letter that Mr. Diodati [Paris] sent you, which included one that Mr. Schickard [Tübingen] wrote to Bernegger [printer in Strasbourg], asking him to send you his observations of the eclipse. I showed it to Gaultier [Aix] and asked Garrat [Agarrat, Peiresc’s secretary] to have him [Gaultier] compare it with your observation. I used the same channel to send a second letter from Galileo, the original of which I had sent to Diodati and the copy of another letter from Galileo that Rossi [Galileo’s relative in Lyons] sent.”
It was to all these friends and collaborators in the Republic that Peiresc turned for help when he decided to rededicate himself to the longitude project. In early 1628 he organized a smaller recording of an eclipse—with just himself on his roof and friends in a village near Aix and in Paris—and this time the method worked. The measurements were “precise” despite, he quipped, “the barbarism and uncouthness in our poor country.” Using the gathered data, he could correct the difference in longitude between Paris and Aix, which was then off by more than two degrees.
But he wanted more. His sights were still set on measuring just how far and wide the Mediterranean Sea stretched. The search was on for another lunar eclipse, and when he discovered that one would occur on the night of August 28, 1635, Peiresc got to work. To gather the observations he needed, he would reach beyond the cerebral confines of the Republic of Letters, to individuals stationed at the extreme edge of the map. Their value was their geographic location. But before he could recruit them, he would have to convince them. They would, in some cases, be taking an enormous risk.
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REDRAWING A MAP might sound like a mundane cause upon which to concentrate such intense attention, but the letters tell a different story. Peiresc had to gently pull these potential observers toward a new relationship with nature, one not at all familiar or safe. Letters turned out to be quite useful in this conversion process. The medium was a conduit for slow thinking. Letters acted like oil in the gears of idea production: the throat-clearing pleasantries, the lines upon lines where a mind could wander, an informality that didn’t demand definitiveness yet gave space for argument to build lightly. These were the qualities that made letters so critical to the community of proto-scientists. But they also worked well for introducing a new worldview. The ruminative aspect of letters, the embedded patience of them, avoided what might otherwise feel like the locked-horn confrontation of one system of truth trying to overtake another.
Peiresc began by probing for possible participants. When two Portuguese traders in precious stones passed through Aix on their way to sail to India, he checked to see if perhaps they knew of some learned Westerner, Jew or Christian, in those foreign parts who could take measurements during an eclipse, whether lunar or solar, and send them back to him. Potential contacts were then vetted by Peiresc. Were they serious and dependable enough? Did they have the fundamental math skills to calculate distance? His letters are full of these urgent questions. When he learns, two months before the eclipse, of a new bishop named Isaac living in the foothills of Mount Lebanon, Peiresc writes to a third party to get any information he can about this interestingly situated man. He wanted to have “all the instructions you could provide concerning the age, country, good manners, and teaching of the bishop Isaac, in what place you have come to know him, and especially, of the knowledge that he might have of Arabic, Latin, and other languages. And if he has interests more curious than common, and where he obtained his title of bishop…”
In early 1635, Peiresc began a correspondence with Father Celestin de St. Lidwine, who was living in a Carmelite monastery in Aleppo. Peiresc’s first letters are typical, giving Celestin a sense of his own interests. “If you would encounter, by chance, whether among the Greek monks or the dervishes, some book on music, a little old, not only in Greek, but in Arabic or other oriental languages, principally of those where might be preserved some notes of ancient music, I would willingly employ my money.” Very soon, he is also trying to persuade Celestin to join the longitude project, promising that even one good set of observations could help yield the real distances between places and “an infinity of other great things praiseworthy in our century and to posterity.” He also suggests that Celestin might involve local astronomers in the project, offering to make his own data available to them, “to give them pleasure in the comparison with ours.”
But the biggest challenge before him was that educated men in these distant places were often devoutly religious. They were missionaries or solitary monks. And they were, by their very nature, resistant to such an enterprise. To interrogate the natural world on one’s own—or worse, as a group—was a threat to the Catholic Church. This was especially true when it came to phenomena like comets or eclipses. The church’s pared-down vision of Earth sitting immovable at the center of the universe was frequently complicated by these streaking events above one’s head. Even curiosity seemed, at some level, suspect. Though Europe had experienced the Renaissance and Reformation, both of which elevated subjectivity and individual will, this was a church that demanded deference to doctrine, with Saint Augustine’s fifth-century dictum still standing: “It is not necessary to probe into the nature of things as was done by the Greeks….It is enough for the Christian to believe that the only cause of all created things, whether heavenly or earthly, whether visible or invisible, is the goodness of the Creator, the one true God.”
If this unease about the meddling of natural philosophy was not enough, there was also the cautionary tale of Galileo. One of the most famous men in Europe, at sixty-nine he had recently been forced to his knees before the Inquisition and made to denounce in front of ten cardinals his “errors and heresies,” which he now promised to “abjure, curse, and detest” then and forevermore. His crime had been the writing of a book that argued forcefully (and in a way that seemed to mock the pope as a simpleminded idiot) that the church’s static and geocentric view of the universe was wrong. Galileo’s book Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems was denounced and banned as blasphemous, and he was sentenced to house arrest for the remainder of his days. But the church’s ire made the entire Republic of Letters shudder. Descartes, receiving the news in Protestant Holland, wrote to a friend in Paris that he might now need to “suppress” the publication of his own book The World, which would further elaborate on Earth’s revolutions around the sun.
Peiresc had always looked to Galileo with awe and no small measure of envy, and he learned of his persecution with sadness. “Poor Galileo had to declare solemnly that he did not support the opinion that the earth moved, yet in his dialogue he used strong reasons to support it,” he wrote in one letter following the verdict. But the main lesson he took away from this episode, coming after a lifetime in which both men had pursued very different paths toward the same ends, was that it was better to work incrementally and quietly. Peiresc managed to stay within the good graces of the church while also engaging with the intellectuals who questioned its most treasured precepts. If ever forced to defend himself, he could respond that he and his correspondents were simply exploring divine creation in all its manifestations. He trusted that even the church would eventually change its dogmatic approach. There were members of the Vatican hierarchy who discreetly corresponded from time to time with the natural philosophers of the Republic of Letters, covertly welcoming new discoveries even if tradition kept them from saying so openly. By pushing toward the outer limits of acceptable speculation, Galileo had exploded the old ways of thinking, and it’s his name we remember today, not Peiresc’s. But the patient antiquary had another approach—the hushed, discursive conversation of a letter versus the loud declaration of a book—one he thought preferable not only because it avoided certain risk but because of the collective insights it yielded, albeit “carefully and over time.”
This cautious nature was on full display when Peiresc appealed to the powerful cardinal Francesco Barberini, a nephew of the pope’s, to lessen Galileo’s sentence. Peiresc knew that Barberini, though a pious upholder of his uncle’s rule (he had personally sat in judgment of Galileo), was drawn to natural philosophy. To strengthen their bond, Peiresc would even send the cardinal the occasional rare specimen—he had once even passed along a gazelle, small and brown with sharp ribbed horns, which he himself had received from a North African correspondent who compared it to a unicorn. “Fragility is sometimes worthy of excuse and forgiveness,” Peiresc pleaded in Galileo’s defense. He tried to downplay the Dialogue as a lighthearted, almost comic, juggling of abstractions and not the clever indictment of the church that it most certainly was. When Barberini ignored his plea, Peiresc wrote again, intensifying his argument. The punishment of Galileo would one day seem as wrongheaded as what was inflicted on Socrates by Athens, “so much reproached by other nations and by the very descendants of those who caused him so much trouble.” Peiresc was never anything but obsequious in his approach (“I stoop before you with the greatest submission of which I am capable,” he began), but he couldn’t and didn’t hide that Galileo, in his eyes, was a mistreated genius. The arguments and gifts like the gazelle seemed to have an effect. The astronomer was granted his request to transfer his house arrest to Florence, and he thanked Peiresc profusely, describing his intervention as an “undertaking where so many others who recognize my innocence have remained silent.”
When the men of the cloth resisted Peiresc’s entreaties to join his experiment, he approached them in a similar spirit. He didn’t shy away from engaging them in an exchange about Christianity and what it allowed. For him, there was little internal conflict. Natural philosophy was simply the process of uncovering more of God’s glory. The church shouldn’t resist these discoveries but rather expand in order to include them. It should delight in these new wonders and see in them a reason for increased faith. “The book of nature is the book of books, and there is nothing so conclusive as the observation of things,” Peiresc wrote to Father Celestin in April 1635, four months before the eclipse.
He also appealed to practicality, as he did with another Capuchin missionary based in Aleppo, Michelange de Nantes. When the priest voiced theological concern, Peiresc responded that looking through a telescope would “not be injurious to your pious and charitable conquest of souls. On the contrary, this could one day serve as a lure to attract others to follow your example.” He also stressed that his astronomical work could help in establishing a more accurate church calendar. For those still wary, he could point to the support of powerful cardinals who had ordered observations in Italy and the Levant and specifically directed priests and astronomers in Rome, Padua, and Naples to prepare their telescopes and abide by Peiresc’s requests.
